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The story
After a Tobu Railway express train struck and killed four track weed-clearing workers, passengers were seen smiling during TV interviews about the incident — prompting posters on 5channel (Japan’s largest anonymous forum) to ask, “Why isn’t this a bigger deal?”
The thread argued over who’s liable for damages, the dangerous reality of track-maintenance and weed-clearing work, and why the story has gotten so little media coverage.
What people said
That's insane.
The smiling really got to me…
If there wasn't some careless guy on the crew, the accident wouldn't have happened at all, no?
Well, it's not like they're producing anything. Just cutting grass.
They weren't paying passengers, so if anything this'll be handled as a straight-up damages/liability claim.
If this ends the way TEPCO did (the utility whose stock cratered after the Fukushima disaster), you already know what to do with Tobu Railway stock, right?
I don't think it's that… though I have no idea how much they spend on TV ads.
They're just still in the "prep work" stage.
These days the media gets bashed for emotional criticism, so they hold back.
The train photographers ("tori-tetsu" — obsessive railfans who chase trains for photos). Reason: because they're creepy.
I'd guess the people who were struck and killed probably weren't at fault at all. Beyond that, we really won't know until it's properly investigated.
(-人-) [hands clasped in prayer]
The fault lies with the workers who died, their lookout colleague, and the company.
We don't even know the contractual liability between Tobu and the contractor. Until this is properly investigated, outsiders like us have no business prejudging who owes how much in damages.
Don't strain yourself trying to sound smart with words like "prejudge" lmao
Don't jump in when you don't know anything. This kind of work belongs to the track-maintenance contractors. The dead workers' company was contracted for track maintenance — weed-clearing is just one part of that job. And safety management during the work is the contractor's responsibility.
You can't do weed-clearing in the middle of the night, and you can't just halt trains during the day either. Even when the Yamanote Line announces service suspensions for construction way ahead of time, tons of idiots still show up on the day and complain to station staff.
Nah, that's not it. At night there's the real track-maintenance work — swapping out rails, replacing gravel ballast, serious stuff. And they have to finish all of that in the 4-5 hours between the last train and the first train. Daytime weed-clearing is more like side pocket-money work.
Background and Key Points
For readers unfamiliar with Japanese rail operations: track-side maintenance in Japan is almost never done by the railway company’s own staff. Companies like Tobu contract out inspection, ballast replacement, and weed-clearing to specialized subcontractors, often multiple layers deep, working in the narrow overnight or between-train windows the thread describes. This structure is common across Japan’s dense private-rail network and is one reason liability in a fatal accident isn’t simple: it has to be sorted out between the railway, the prime contractor, and whichever crew was actually on site, which is exactly the tangle posters in the thread couldn’t agree on.
The thread didn’t split over whether the deaths mattered — nearly everyone agreed the muted reaction was troubling — but over why coverage has stayed so thin. Some blamed ad spending or media timidity, others chalked it up to the story still being in an early “investigation pending” phase, and one poster flatly rejected the idea of assigning blame before facts are established, which drew pushback from others eager to name a culprit.
What’s likely to get lost on non-Japanese readers is the compensation math floated in the thread. Damages guesses of ¥300 million per victim reflect civil liability against a company, but workplace deaths in Japan are first and typically primarily handled through rousai (workers’ compensation insurance) tied to the employer of record — the subcontractor, not necessarily Tobu — which pays out on a fixed schedule far below those speculative figures. The thread’s TEPCO comparison is also worth flagging as pure speculation: unlike Fukushima, there’s no indication here of the kind of systemic corporate failure that tanked TEPCO’s stock for years.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Nandemo Jikkyo G board) thread “Tobu Railway: ‘Our express train ran over and killed 4 weed-clearing workers’ — Why isn’t this a bigger deal?”
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